1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to device management in a home network, and more particularly, to a method for scheduling a management operation on devices in a home network.
2. Description of the Related Art
The growing popularity of smart home technologies will lead to heavy utilization of network bandwidth, as these technologies allow deployment of many wireless devices at home. Since these devices at home develop with many user based services, these heavily deployed devices require a management facility for most of their management operations, such as, upgrades (software/firmware), diagnoses, configuration changes, and so on.
Generally, these management operations are controlled by one central server called Device Management (DM) server. This server has home devices info up-to-date and these servers are expected to maintain up-to-date information of all devices which are being managed. Whenever there is a management operation that needs to be performed on a few devices of the home, this server is expected to take care of all the activities from initiating the request to the end of the management operation. Obviously, these kinds of management operations add traffic to the ongoing home network operations, and this might lead to a case where home networks are highly affected. In some cases, they even go to the level of clogging the home network, for example, scenarios where management operations of most of the home devices need to be performed in bulk.
In a typical smart home scenario, the devices could be fully functional with a sufficient amount of resources (display, power, storage, processor, and so on). These devices are connected directly (e.g., Wi-Fi enabled) to the home access point, and they could be other sets of devices which are having low power (mostly operated on batteries) and with low processing power, limited storage, and so on. The constrained devices not having sufficient resources could only be connected to home access point through Multiple RF Radio for Different Standards (MRRD) kind of devices (for example, home gateway having support for Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Z-Wave, and etc.).
Smart home technology and solutions are currently emerging by deploying many devices at home to provide automated services. In order to provide these features, smart home technology is making most of the electronic devices around a home to act “smart” or fully automated with more devices deployed. Many devices may exist in the home network such as Intruder Alarm Systems, Different kind of Lighting systems, Window Covering Controller, Door Lock, Smart Plug, White Goods, Meter Interface, Scene Selector, Combined Interface, and so on.
Considering a home scenario, where few devices are used by home users for playing on-line video, another home user is using a hand held device to hear a song by streaming the music from the Internet, at the same time one or more IP-Camera devices are in process of uploading real-time captured videos to the remote server, and the other user is controlling some home appliance remotely, that is, all these activities are happening in parallel. In such scenarios, few access routers and the router which connects with a backbone network are already carrying heavy traffic and the local network will be overloaded if the management server wants to do some management activity at this juncture.
In another scenario, when the management server wants to perform a few management related activities on a group of home devices, and if all these home devices start responding at same time and start communicating with the management server all at once, there will be a huge amount of traffic within the smart home.
This might even result in a situation, where responses of the management server to the few device requests may not reach an actual requested device due to the heavy traffic at home, and as a result, some devices may have to retry and there is no guarantee that this re-transmission will be successful or not due to timeouts. Non-constrained devices performing transmissions might be allowed. However, these non-planned or improperly initiated management activities should never cause or yield a retrial for the constrained devices. Re-try by a constrained device means more power consumption, waste of processing power, and so on.